All this disintegration of the spiritual foundations of our domestic institutions spreads with the most telling effect, because most heedlessly, among the population of the industrial towns. But it spreads also outside the limits of the industrial classes ; for the habits of life and of thought inculcated by the machine technology are not limited to them, even if these classes are the ones who suffer most and most severely from the machine discipline. The disintegration shows itself, in varying degree, in all modem industrial communities, and it is visible somewhat in proportion as the community is modem and industrial. The machine is a leveller, a vulgarizer, whose end seems to be the extirpation of all that is respectable, noble, and dignified in human interconrae and ideals.
What happens within the narrow range of the institutions of domestic life repeats itself in sub-
CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 359
stance in the larger field of national life and ideals Fealty to a superior installed by law or custom suffers under the discipline of a life which, as regards its most formative exigencies, is not guided by conventional grounds of validity. And the transmuted form of fealty called patriotism ia in much the same insecure case. The new ground of class solidarity and antagonism, for which these extreme spokesmen of the indnetrial regime stand, is neither ecclesiastic, dynastic, territorial, nor linguistic; it is industrial and materialistic. But in their attitude of heedleaeness toward the dynastic and national conventions the socialists are merely the extreme exponents of the spirit of the age in the modem industrial communities.